I am not an avid gamer, but I do have a weakness for simulation and building games. A friend once gave me a copy of SimCity 3000 and I didn’t leave my dorm room for two weeks, stopping only occasionally to inhale Ramen noodles. This is obviously not healthy, but Burger Tycoon is a lower complexity game that’s good for spending an hour or two. The objective is to run a McDonald’s type business well, balancing evil with profit and keeping just out of public contempt.

I check out this Infosthetics blog occasionally, about cool stuff people are doing with information displays. Also check out Uncrate products which I can’t ship to this godforsaken isle. Found a couple very, very cool things lately. The first two are new ways of looking at photos, and the other is a new way of looking at one’s Facebook network. Getty Images has a new thing called Moodstream, which is totally blowing my mind with its (quick) streaming combo of photo, video and audio. Totally awesome for a club. PicLens has this Firefox plugin which does something similar for photos on almost any page, though it works the best on Flickr or Facebook. Finally, Nexus is the coolest (re:only) Facebook plugin I’ve seen. It takes all your friends and graphs it as a literal network. I can physically see how people are connected, and how my Ohio or Montreal friends are here or there. Very cool, and only the tip of the iceberg in terms of informatics to come.

This is the presentation I was illustrating for ThaTha. It’s as yet unfinished but I’m putting it here so he can look at it from Manila. It’s about the warnings we did have and what we could do better. Besides never going to the beach again. All the information herein is from Rohan Samarajiva and www.lirneasia.net. The timeline and all. I just illustrated it.

This is a video game voting guide, which Merit really likes. It’s from loveinwar.com, via wonkette.

Gold “nano-bullets” shoot down tumours

This is from the University of Wales, Bangor. It’s a bunch of perceptual illusions. The Buddha said that all Experience was Illusion. It’s called Maya in Indian Vedic thought.

This is what the Internet population is projected to look like in 2015. What got me thinking originally was this quote from one of the readings for my Consciousness and Virtual Reality class. I can’t find the original page now, but the idea has been passed around. “There is the potential for emerging nations to [...]